A note from the editor: This is a guest post by someone I know who has had struggles with gender dysphoria and autogynephilia. I felt his story is worth sharing because he struggles with this in an intelligent and spiritually mature way. Gender dysphoria has become an increasingly prominent and controversial issue over the past several years. But I think Christians should be informed on the topic. While there is certainly evidence that some gender dsyphoric presentations have a social contagion factor, there is also evidence that in utero biology plays a role (as it may with homosexual desires).
Nobody chooses their struggles – especially those which come about from genetic or biological factors. It’s fine to disagree with the author, but please do so in a graceful way. He didn’t choose this struggle any more than a homosexual chooses who they’re attracted to or an alcoholic chooses their temptations.
Lastly, I recommended this young man post under a pseudonym, which he has done. You can leave either me or “Vasily” comments below.
In Christ,
Fr. Jeremy
Anna had just arrived at college. She wore a blue, calf-length dress and a bright smile as she wandered the dorm commons and the quad, meeting all the people she was sure would be her friends. Her heart was full of warmth, her mind captivated by the new adventure and thoughts of all the things she would learn. But most of all, she was herself, a lily blooming in the field, with a beautiful life ahead of her.
She stood on the grass outside the entrance to the dorm, talking with other new students. Suddenly, her senses began to leave her. The faces of her fellow students became blurry, their voices indistinct. The walls of the dormitory fuzzed and melted. She tried to hold her vision, but the world was dissolving around her.
She remembered that she wasn’t a college freshman.
She remembered that she wasn’t a girl named Anna.
And then I woke up.
Dreams like this1 are wish-fulfillment, and their ending always comes with a lingering sweetness and something of a sense of loss. Like many, I miss college; the new beginnings and infinite horizons and easy friendships. Yet the greater emotion is not nostalgia for times past, but yearning for what never was and can never be. I am not a woman. But some deep part of me wishes that I were.
Today, this desire only makes itself known in its full force in dreams. Offer my conscious self an enchanted tincture that would transform me into Anna, and I would refuse. I have too much to lose: a loving wife, years of formative memories and experience. And I have a more compelling picture of what I ought to become that puts the lie to the felt “rightness” of the desire. Only in dreams, when I do not remember these things, do I still immerse myself in this wish for the impossible. Though the desire is not gone when I am awake, I refuse its demand to be indulged. I put it from my mind, in favor of better things, and it diminishes. The fantasy is ultimately an obstacle to happiness.
But this was not always my attitude. Though I have always known that my wish to be female was one which could never be fulfilled, there was a time when I welcomed and nurtured the feeling. I count myself fortunate that I was eventually able to find wisdom to understand my abnormal desires and manage myself.
Others with like struggles have not been so lucky. An invisible enemy has laid traps for them, now more than ever before. They have strange and powerful emotions they do not understand, and perhaps cannot voice. And the world offers them only pain or enticing lies. On one side they are pushed away by a lack of sympathy — by prejudice, fear, and even revulsion. On the other they are drawn in by acceptance — but what they are given is a balm which is really a subtle poison; a hope that will increase their pain; an invitation to delusion; a sweet whisper in their ears that encourages them to self destruction. Is it any wonder that so many are caught in the snare?
They are told that their disordered desires are gifts that give them insight into their inmost self. They are told that they are not boys who wish they were girls, but that they are “trans girls” who have not realized their true identities. They begin to believe it, because they want it to be true, and it makes sense of feelings outsiders do not understand. They indulge their feelings and their new identity, and other things mold to it. Every fluttering of the heart, every reinterpreted memory, is taken as further proof of who they think they are. It is no wonder if they come to hate their male body, because it is not the female one they believe they ought to inhabit; no wonder if they come to be tormented by the unbridgeable chasm between what they want and believe should be, and what is. And they are told a great lie, that hormones and surgeries can accomplish what they desire, and so the most desperate among them undertake radical medical interventions and mutilate their bodies.
That those leading them along this path to destruction are not malicious is no matter. The evil is done nonetheless.
Against all this, I offer my story, and the insights into the nature of my disordered desires that have brought me to a place where I am satisfied in rejecting them.
Perhaps you are reading this because a boy or man you care about — a son or godson, a brother, a friend, even a boyfriend or husband — has expressed a wish that they were a girl or woman. In that case, I want you to understand what they may be going through, to get a sense of what it is like to struggle with such feelings, so that you can give support and guidance to your loved one.
Perhaps it is you, yourself, who are confronted with these desires. In that case, I want you to know that you are not alone, and that there is a way through — a path which may involve struggle, but which leads to healing rather than error and pain. And I hope that the insights which have been instrumental for me will also be helpful to you.
Or perhaps you are reading simply to understand. In that case, I hope that you find it illuminating.
Out of the events of a single life one can tell not one story, but many. By choosing the focal points and linchpins, by bringing some things to the fore and leaving others out, one can build many narratives. This is one story of my life: the story of my disordered desire to be female. It is a true story. But it is not the whole story; even the things I describe were never enough to dominate my experience.
You should not assume that my story is universal, even among those with similar struggles. Details differ in the reality, and differ even more in the telling, as memories are revised and histories are shaded for conformity to desired narratives. But many of the things I went through are common enough that it is not merely about me.
As a young child, I liked girls better than boys. They seemed nicer, for one, and they got to wear pretty clothing. I do not remember when I began to have wishes that I was a girl, or to daydream about being a girl. Perhaps it was early on, but given the tenuousness of childhood memory I cannot say with any certainty how early or frequently I had these thoughts. In any case, young children think about many things with no later import.
But I do remember one occasion particularly vividly. I was, I think, eight or nine years old.2 I was sitting on an inflatable hopper ball, in the finished basement at home, daydreaming that I was a girl. It was a notably pleasant thought; it brought a feeling of emotional warmth and happiness, and a bodily thrill and excitement.
Not too long after, I read some of the Oz books.3 In one, the boy Tip discovers that he is really the girl Ozma, transformed by an enchantment in infancy. He — she — is returned to her true form by a magic spell. The scene captivated me. What would that be like, to be transformed into a girl? I wish that I could be.
One summer — I was nine or ten — I took a quilting class. I was the only boy in a group of girls. I was weirdly pleased with this. I didn’t think that this made me a girl, but I did think that it made me more like girls, and less like boys, which was a good thing in my head for some reason. A few years later I would look back on this, as on other minor and mostly irrelevant preferences, as a bit of evidence in favor of the sense of “rightness” I felt when I imagined being a girl. I now see this as obviously motivated reasoning. Overinterpretation of small things like this is quite common; real memories are forced into a mold determined by the emotions.
I was eleven when I had my first real crush. The girl, who was two years older, took no notice of me, but I could hardly keep from thinking about her. I desperately wanted to be with her. I desperately wanted — to be her? The emotion was bizarre and absolutely overwhelming. On several occasions I found myself mouthing the words: I want to be her, but the next best thing is to be with her. What do you even do with thoughts like this?
While my first crush was, despite its strangeness and intensity, entirely chaste, this would begin to change soon. Around the time I turned twelve I began to have sexual desires along with my infatuations. I had sexual dreams about the girls I liked. My infatuation-fantasies were sometimes chaste and sometimes erotic. Sometimes I would imagine being the object of my affection; this brought a sense of emotional warmth and happiness, and sometimes the erotic response as well. I did not know what to make of it.
By thirteen I was well into puberty. I had semi-regular dreams in which I was, or was transformed into, a girl. These were very pleasant, and had a feeling of emotional warmth and sweetness, of happiness and satisfaction, which lingered when I awoke. I wondered why this was. I knew that I could never actually become a girl; why did I want so much to be one? And how did this relate to my also-overpowering infatuations with actual girls I knew? I began to deliberately fantasize about becoming a girl.
Around this time I developed minor gynecomastia (the growth of a small amount of breast tissue in boys going through puberty; it is quite common4); I had small, firm lumps under my nipples. I asked, and my father confirmed that this was normal and would eventually go away. He thought that I was worried about it. I used it as fodder for my fantasies, of which I had spoken nothing.
I was about fourteen when I learned about lucid dreaming. I practiced techniques for becoming aware of the dream state and directing it as desired. They worked, and I regularly took weekend naps for the primary purpose of having lucid dreams. People usually use their lucid dreams to live out their fantasies. So did I. My fantasy was being a girl.
I also learned about self-hypnosis. I figured that if a hypnotist could make someone believe they are something or someone else, or create sensations that aren’t there, perhaps I could hypnotize myself into temporarily believing that I was transformed into a girl, and into feeling and seeing that I had breasts and other features of the female anatomy. In this I only had minor success, and only when I was lying in bed partly asleep.
I would continue these practices, on and off, for close to a decade.
Meanwhile, I continued to have frequent and intense infatuations with actual girls I knew. The desire to be particular girls with whom I was obsessed diminished, even while the general desire to be a girl remained and, if anything, grew stronger.
This began to cause a certain dissonance. I was a devout Christian, and I knew that the Bible condemned homosexuality. So I had two very strong desires that were in conflict: my desire to be a girl, and my desire to be with a girl, could not both be morally satisfied.
This did not stop my fantasies, however. I knew, and had always known, that my desire to be a girl could not be actually satisfied, so there was no practical difficulty to work through. As for the theoretical difficulty, there was a simple dodge: I did not fantasize about both being and being with a girl at the same time.
In a way, the explicit involvement of religious thought pushed me in a dangerous direction. Jesus said that “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” which I took to imply that sexual activity was not a factor after the resurrection. This would resolve the dissonance by removing one part of the problem entirely. So why not imagine that my resurrected body would be female instead?5 At the time that seemed fitting, somehow. But it was doubly dangerous.
First, it was a spiritual danger, because it risked subordinating my contemplation of eternal things to my desire to be female. Looking back, the fact that I seriously entertained the thought seems shameful and perhaps blasphemous. And second, it was a psychological danger, because it was a temptation to think that satisfying the desire was actually possible, even if not in this life. I am keenly aware, now, how protective it was that I knew that my desire to be a girl could never be satisfied. It would have been all too easy to warp my life around my wish to be a girl if I had thought that the wish could come true. This fantasy was the thing that most endangered my conviction that it could not.
I don’t remember exactly when, or why, I abandoned that fantasy and line of thought. Perhaps I was being shielded. At any rate, that danger passed, and left behind a small hint to understanding the nature of my disordered desire.
Sometime in high school — I believe I was fifteen — I read a college child development textbook from my parents’ bookshelf. In it was a chapter on so-called “transsexual reassignment”. It seemed utterly implausible and unsatisfactory in outcome, because even surgeries couldn’t actually make a male into a female. I had no idea that it was often people like me who went through with such operations. As always, I found myself wishing there were a real procedure that could actually give me a female body.6
It was near the end of high school that I first encountered stories online about men being transformed into women. Usually these were what one might call “erotica”, frequently containing sensual and even pornographic descriptions of the transformation and its results. My fantasies of becoming a girl had frequently been erotically tinged before, but now — perhaps because of my exposure to this erotica, or perhaps merely for the same reasons that I had read it rather than recoiled from it in the first place — I developed transformation fantasies in which the erotic element was dominant.
I thus had two sorts of fantasies; one primarily nonsexual, one primarily erotic. One could shade into the other, to my chagrin, but there was a definite distinction between the erotic fantasy of transforming into a girl (which universally involved deliberate mental imagery of transformation of body parts) and the “chaste” fantasy, which could often be one of just being a girl (rather than of transformation).
But why should the intense, emotional desire to be a girl be attached to an erotic response, anyway? What is erotic about being or becoming something? In a normal person, nothing. But a normal boy would not have my “chaste” desire either. Perhaps it was the sweetness and right-feeling of my fantasy of being a girl, a desire which itself seemed desirable, which blinded me to the obvious inference: that the twin desires had the same source.
These two encounters — with “transsexual reassignment” in the textbook and male-to-female transformation erotica online — were my first indication that the feelings I had were not entirely unique to me. But neither of them made much sense. The descriptions of the transsexual subjects in the textbook did not seem that familiar to me; what I found online, being so sexually focused, seemed to leave out the more important part of my experience.
My college years were emotionally tumultuous but mostly good. I learned a lot; I made many friends. In my sophomore year I began dating my first real girlfriend. The beginning of that relationship was rapturously happy; a year and a half later when she broke up with me, I was equally devastated.
Like most Christian young men, I was engaged in a constant internal battle with lust7; unlike most, I was also dealing with the recurrent wish that I were not a young man but a young woman. But except when I was dating — when my desire to be a girl was in obvious conflict with my desire to be with my girlfriend — I did not yet see it as a thing to be battled.
It was shortly after I finished college, in the late 2000s to early 2010s, that the “trans” phenomenon first exploded on the internet and I became aware of it. It was hard to be sure whether these people had the same experiences that I did or not. Watch what they said among themselves, and it was eerily familiar — wanting to be a girl, wanting to feel feminine, feeling that one would have been happier if one had been born with a female body. Look at the public rhetoric, and it was all about negatives: “dysphoria”, emotional pain and suffering, the psychic toll of feeling trapped in the wrong body. Were these two different groups, or merely two sides of the same coin? The erotic aspect was rarely mentioned — at least directly. But the art produced by those communities often told a different story, one in which the erotic elements, even when not explicit, were just below the surface. I gradually became convinced that at least a large fraction of these people were like me.
Soon after, I encountered the concept of autogynephilia8, a sexual disorder where a male is aroused by the idea of himself as female. This seemed to capture the erotic side of the phenomenon extremely well. I had a name for at least some of what I was dealing with.
Just the idea of autogynephilia is controversial; even more so its application to the “trans” phenomenon. The originators and early proponents of the term had posited — two decades prior to the explosion of “trans” communities and the erosion of medical gatekeeping — that autogynephiles already accounted for a substantial fraction, between half and two thirds, of male-to-female transsexuals. Needless to say this is not flattering. Nobody likes to hear — regardless of whether it is true — that they have made major life decisions and constructed their identity around what amounts to a sexual fetish.
The reactions from self-identified “trans women” are manifold and contradictory: autogynephilia does not exist; autogynephilia exists, but its sufferers are not the same people as those who consider themselves trans; what is called autogynephilia exists, but is merely normal female sexuality; autogynephilia is real, but is caused by rather than causative of the desire to transition. There is also a brave contingent who embrace the label.
My observations led me to the conclusion that all of the broad denials were wrong. Whatever it was that I had, it included autogynephilia; whatever they might claim about the irrelevance of autogynephilia to the trans phenomenon, these self-identified “trans women” and “trans girls” frequently voiced thoughts and emotions quite similar to my own.
Even so, the proponents of the autogynephilia theory appeared to be wrong as well. There was clearly more to what I experienced than just a strange paraphilia. Whatever the real answer was, at least for me — and, I suspected, for many others as well — autogynephilia was just one part of the puzzle, albeit an important one.
At any rate, it seemed to me that these trans communities were taking young men with feelings like mine, encouraging them to indulge their fantasies to ever-increasing degrees, and telling them that their resulting neuroses were further evidence that they were “trans women”. Perhaps many of these men would have ended in the same place on their own, but the online communities were exacerbating their problems. Seeing the depths of life dissatisfaction and self-delusion that these communities engendered, I decided to steer clear of them.
I was twenty-four when I met my now wife, and rapidly fell in love. We were married a few years later. Having “something to lose” brought my fantasies remarkably under control, in a way that no theoretical consideration had done before. I was now forced to confront that a world in which I was female would also be a world in which I would not have my wife, and that was something I did not want to imagine.
I had long known that the erotic aspect of my fantasy of becoming female was wrong, because it was obviously lustful. Through guilt by association, my “chaste” desire to be a girl was also suspect, but had been difficult to reject on that basis — it had never felt like a mere extension of the erotic part, but presented itself as something sweet, innocent, and deep. My life now offered a concrete and irrefutable reason to reject even this desire.
Nevertheless, I did not have a clear idea about the source of my desire to be female. I had reluctantly come to accept that the desire was not merely impossible to satisfy, but wrong to indulge, and I finally had a powerful emotional reason to not fantasize that could compete with the emotions that encouraged the fantasy. But this was not enough. My reasons to reject my desire to be female were contingent on my life circumstances. I had read more than enough reports of men who blew up their marriages to pursue transition; while I was not in danger of doing so myself, these stories still concerned me. I needed to know why I had these desires, because I needed to be emotionally satisfied in rejecting them.
It is clear that my desire to be female is deeply entwined with romantic and sexual feelings. The erotic aspects of the desire, obviously, but also the connection with wanting to be some of the girls with whom I was infatuated. Nevertheless, this isn’t the whole story. Some have posited that the experience is “being in love with the idea of oneself as a woman”. This is a better explanation than “it’s a fetish”, but it doesn’t quite ring true. There is a missing piece.
Orthodox Christian theology includes the concept of theosis, that those who are saved will be so transformed that they become like God. In a very real sense, theosis is the ultimate goal of life. We are not merely to be rescued from a sinful, fallen state, but to be made into such creatures as can participate in the life of God Himself.
A desire for salvation is thus a desire to be something that transcends one’s current self; more holy, more pure, perfected, made fully into the likeness of God. To desire this, to desire it intensely and unreservedly, is right and proper. As C.S. Lewis puts it in The Weight of Glory:
“[I]t would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us[…]. We are far too easily pleased.”
And in his book For the Life of the World, the Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann quotes the Catholic novelist Léon Bloy in a line that strikes me as profound: “There is but one sadness, that of not being a saint.” So much rests on this matter of becoming what one ought to be, to fulfill one’s telos by what one is.
I believe that this powerful desire — to not merely love, but to be, the Good – is the missing piece. What I should want is to be holy first and foremost, and then (in a lesser desire but still a proper one) want a woman to be my wife, my companion and lover. I believe that my disordered desire to be female arises from an unconscious emotional mingling and confusion of the two. What quirk of my psychology causes these things to get mixed up I do not know, but recognizing the confusion for what it is has given me the emotional satisfaction that I needed.
When I consider my desire to be female, I can reject it with firm satisfaction, because I can know and feel the ways in which it is in error. I can say to myself: “Your feelings are not right, nor are they evil; you are emotionally confused. Your wish is focused on femininity, it is passionate and even erotic, because that is how you ought to desire your wife; your wish is sweet and full of yearning for what you hope to be, because this is how you ought to desire union with God. To indulge the fantasy of being female yourself is to mistake a confusion for the two good things it resembles, and risk depriving yourself of both; you ought rather to direct your heart to the rightly ordered desires instead.”
For those who have not experienced it, the desire that some men have to be women is easy to dismiss out of hand, because to those not afflicted it is so obviously wrong. The purely sexual part, the autogynephilia, is a mere passion of the flesh; a disordered appetite that is to be resisted. The relatively chaste yearning to be female is sheer lunacy, a wish that cannot be fulfilled, a conviction that reflects no underlying reality. This is all true! All unchaste sexual desire is to be resisted, difficult though it may be. The felt “rightness” of the powerful wish to be female is a lie; according to Orthodox theological anthropology, it is not the soul, but only the body, that is sexed. A man is a man because he has a male body; to want otherwise is to want not to match the body and soul but to change who he is.
But simple dismissal is not helpful. These are hard pills to swallow. That people find it difficult to dismiss sexual appetites even when they know they are wrong is an understatement. And even more, bloodless arguments about the composition of the human being pale in comparison to what seems a sweet and beautiful yearning. It is not enough to tell a man that what he wants is wrong; he must understand in his heart why it is harmful, and learn to desire what is good even more. He needs sympathy and the kind of correction that flows from understanding.
And the condition, though uncommon, is not vanishingly rare. While individual experiences differ — in intensity, in the relative proportion of sexual and nonsexual desires, in how each person behaves in response — there are credible estimates that as much as three percent of men are affected in some way.9 They need good counsel. Let them hear neither “You are deluded and a pervert” nor “Your feelings are right and true”, but “Your feelings are confused, because you have mingled two proper desires into one false one.”
May we overcome our passions by training up our love for God and our desire for our ultimate and proper end of blessed union with Him.
Endnotes
1 The opening narrative is based on actual dreams I’ve had.
2 Like several of the incidents I relate here, I remember what happened and the associated emotions much more clearly than I do exactly when it happened.
3 These are children’s fantasy; a series of sequels to the better-known The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This scene takes place in the second book of the series.
4 Gynecomastia at this age is purely due to hormone changes during puberty, and occurs in over half of adolescent boys.
5 From an Orthodox perspective, this sort of fantasy is clearly a bad idea. But I wasn’t Orthodox at the time and had no real concept of why it might be dangerous.
6 I also remember thinking that perhaps the results could have been tolerable if I’d been able to have something like that done before puberty. Even then, though, I would not have had what I really wanted, which was to be fully and entirely female. That would have required literal magic, and I knew it.
7 Mostly the ordinary sort, though the erotic transformation-to-female fantasy figured in as well.
8 It’s worth noting that the most common behavior associated with autogynephilia is erotic cross-dressing; according to some estimates, ninety percent of men with autogynephilia have regularly engaged in it. One major insight of the concept of autogynephilia is that this cross-dressing is not a mere clothing fetish, but an outgrowth of the more central desire to be, or to imagine oneself to be, a woman. People who cross-dress typically do it because it makes them feel more feminine. I suspect that cross-dressing is so common because feminine dress is a potent symbol of femininity, and because it is a physical, and thus more viscerally effective, way of trying to live the fantasy of being female.
I mention all this because it is with respect to cross-dressing that I differ most from the majority of men with autogynephilia: I never engaged in it. In fact, nearly all the actions I took were purely mental ones: daydreaming, fantasizing, lucid dreaming, self-hypnosis. I can’t be certain whether this was because cross-dressing would have done nothing for my fantasy, or merely because (as I suspect) I had a strong mental block against pretending to be what I am not and an aversion to doing anything that might have been noticed by others. At any rate, I don’t intend to try the experiment.
9 This estimate originates from studies trying to understand erotic cross-dressing, because it’s difficult to get accurate estimates of feelings rather than behaviors. It is likely that for many men, the whole thing is experienced as merely an odd fetish, or is too weak or intermittent to drive either serious introspection or radical life changes. On the other hand, I myself would have been left out of such studies, because I never cross-dressed. And I suspect that there may be some for whom the explicitly erotic part of the desire to be female is nearly absent, just as there are some people who are capable of falling in love but have little interest in sex. All told, I expect that the three percent estimate is likely close to accurate, but there is not enough good quality data to be certain.
Lest I come across as too alarmist, I don’t think that all these three percent need quite the same level of help; at a rough guess, perhaps one half of one percent are at any real risk of falling down the “trans” rabbit hole. I still think that most of them would benefit immensely from support in their struggles.
I’d like to append a couple of clarifications:
1. Despite the title, I don’t consider myself “trans”. This is because, to me, the word can refer to either a self-adopted identity, which I don’t claim because I don’t think of my experiences as fundamental to who I am; or to someone who has taken steps to transition (either body modification or living as if one were the other sex), which I certainly haven’t done. Nevertheless it is true that my feelings are of the same kind that many trans-identifying people have, so the shorthand is not entirely wrong.
2. The term “gender dysphoria” is used in different ways by different people. I’m reluctant to claim the term for myself: my experience has not been of the constant, unrelenting, tormenting feeling of wrongness that some people have described, and to use the same word feels like appropriating someone else’s pain. On the other hand, I’m fairly certain that what most trans-identifying people refer to as “gender dysphoria” is not that either, and the most common situation is more similar to mine.
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Finally, I’d like to extend an offer: if you or someone you know is struggling with things like what I describe in this essay, and you’d like to talk to me about it away from the public eye, please reach out to Fr. Jeremy. I have set up a dedicated email address for this which he can give to you.